Marianne Lindemann née Simon

Hans Heymann Lindemann was, according to a Red Cross card from 1949, a designer, and that is all I could find out about his life before his deportation. So much of our family history has been erased.

After WW2 began, Henny’s daughter, Marianne was compelled to work as a forced labourer for the German aircraft firm Heinrich Lehmann Aerobau, making accessories for German warplanes, in a workshop at Bergmannstr 102. Lehmann had around 20 Jewish workers and he was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg for employing forced labour and spent about 5 years in prison.  

Henny Simon was sent to Auschwitz on 12th January 1943, aged 62. Her daughter would have had to wave goodbye to her at the doorstep of her apartment, as the Gestapo took her away, undoubtedly suspecting what would happen to her mother.

Henny was number 376 on the list of passengers for the 26th Osttransport – the name given to the trains with cattle trucks for carriages on which Jews were sent to the camps. It  left from the Putlitzstrasse station in Moabit and arrived in Auschwitz the following day.  There were about 1,200 Jews on it. As soon as they arrived there was a selection process - only 127 people were selected for work, the remaining 898 were sent directly to the gas chambers. On the Transportliste there are list of facts to fill in - age, address and a line for arbeitsfahig - fit for work. There is a minus sign beside this on Henny’s entry, indicating negative - so we can assume that she was murdered as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz.

Five weeks after Henny was taken, Marianne and Hans were ordered to an assembly point in Berlin for their deportation. Before the Nazis murdered Jews, they stole their property in a meticulous and bureaucratic way. So on 17th February six days before, they were deported, Berlin’s finance department sent officials to Marianne and Hans’ home to compile a property declaration. This Vermögenserklärung gives us a few more details about their lives. On Hans Lindemann’s form, to the question whether he is entitled to any pay, provisions, pensions or contracts it says ‘Pay for 17 days’. The Nazi officials went room by room making an inventory of all his, Henny and Marianne’s belongings. They owned 2 wardrobes, 4 chairs, a couch, 2 carpets, 3 bedside rugs, 2 ceiling lamps, a desk, a bookcase, around 100 books, 1 dictionary. they had no artworks or antiques, and no shares or bonds.
From Marianne’s property declaration, we learn she was the only one with a bank account, at the Dresdner bank with only around 40 marks in it. She was owed a week’s pay.  

Two days before deportation, Hans and Marianne were already waiting at the collection point, the Jewish community centre at Grosse Hamburger Str. 26, where a memorial now exists. A Nazi legal clerk came to see them, handing them a humiliating document to sign authorising the transfer of all their assets and property to the state.

One Holocaust survivor who was on the same deportation as Marianna and Hans. Dagobert Zymentstein, born in 1910, remembered his arrest - he was also a forced labourer so we may imagine it is very like what happened to Marianne. “I was arrested by the Gestapo on a Saturday in 1943 at my workplace in Berlin at the firm, Containers & Tubes. The Gestapo arrived in a truck. I and other colleagues were told to get in. We were taken to an assembly camp. An average of about 40 people were accommodated in a room measuring about 25 sq m. We were forced to sleep on the bare wooden floor, without mattresses or blankets. There was one toilet for every 40 persons. There was a sink. Towels and soap were not available. The food consisted of a bowl of soup with a slice of bread per day. This was distributed in the morning at around 11.00 o'clock. Medical care was not available. During an air raid we had to stay in the rooms. The room was locked and guarded.  I know of cases where men, women and also children jumped out of the window in despair. I also observed how prisoners at the deportation site were beaten with rifle butts and fists by members of the SS and the Gestapo. Insults such as "Jude", "filthy pig" were nothing new.”

On 24th February 1943, Marianne and Hans were both deported on the 30th Ost- Transport. Marianna was 29. Hans had just celebrated his 25th birthday the day before. The train left from the Moabit goods station with 913 Jews on board.  When the cattle trucks were unloaded of their human cargo, Zymentstein recalls that “Anybody not moving fast enough was beaten by the SS men with a whip or struck otherwise. Alsatian dogs were also set on the prisoners".

There was an immediate selection process and 156 men, and 106 women were selected for hard labour - certainly including Hans and probably also Marianne since they are both described on the transport list as fit for work. The remaining 651 Jews were sent straight to the gas chambers. Only 11 people from this Transport survived the war

Back in Berlin, Aryan citizens who suffered financially as a result of the deportation of the Jews could claim compensation from the state. On 14th of March 1943 Marianne and Hans’ landlord filed a claim with Berlin’s finance department - since “the Jews the Simons were evacuated from the apartment” he was owed 55 marks in rent. Another claim was filed by the electricity and light company of Berlin. In September 1943, Berlin’s finance office wrote to Marianne’s bank telling them to hand over the 40 marks in her account. They also wrote to her employer Heinrich Lehmann, claiming for the state the 2 weeks of pay she was owed.

We don’t know when Marianne died in Auschwitz, but for Hans Lindemann there are details. He appears on a list of names in the hospital for the inmates for the first week of April 1943, so just 6 weeks after he arrived in Auschwitz. It states that he had ‘durchfall’ which translates as diarrhoea and could have been cholera - Auschwitz was rife with epidemics in the years 1942-3.

Other members of Hans Lindemann’s family managed to escape. His sister Johanna went to London and was living in Park Avenue NW11 in 1947 when she lodged an inquiry with the Red Cross about her brother. In 1959 a woman called Charlotte Bloch who is described as a ‘sister’ (it is not clear if she is Hans or Marianne’s sister) applied for compensation from the German state. In 1958 a woman called Adelheid Peschke, living in Berin in Wuthenowstr 4, applied for compensation payments for both Hans Lindemann and Pauline Lindemann, the latter born in 1871 in Warsaw. Pauline was surely Hans Lindemann’s mother, who was killed in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt on 17th April 1944.